Gender and the Sciences: Pupils’ Gender-Based Conceptions of School Subjects, Lynda Measor, 1983, Offprint Reader, p16

Sex Matters - more for Girls than Boys ...

This was a qualitative study 24 years ago and drawn from interviews and observations with pupils in a large comprehensive school about 27 years ago. The researcher believes that children build up gender identities at school and see certain subjects supporting a gender choice and others undermining peer acceptance, which are resisted passively or actively. The focus is on physical science subjects - the boys and girls traditionally seeing it as a masculine area, and domestic science, seen as a feminine area.

Interesting stories are recounted sometimes with pertinent quotations from pupils to support the original supposition. They are convincing. Some fascinating details are provided to show insight into why the pupils believed and acted as they did.

Measor speaks of negotiation of gender identities of adolescent pupils (11-13 years). She suggests:

“the girls actively use d aspects of the school to construct their identity, in this case their feminine identity… Science lessons provided an arena for acting out of feminine susceptibilities in a public setting.”

The girls used passive resistance – being late, packing up early, talking etc. She says the boys’ reaction to domestic science, which was more active and noisy resistance, was similarly constructive to a masculine gender identity. She writes:

“Pupils could use their hostility to one of the science subjects - “natural” or “domestic” – to signal an interest in things masculine or feminine. At the same time pupils used strategies that they felt to be appropriate to their sex.”

What the teachers thought also mattered. Measor thinks that community and teacher- expectations and prejudices make “a very solid wall of resistance to any change.”

Conclusions drawn included

• Original rationale that gender identities are constructed at school
• That pupils are not gender-neutral as learning theory had suggested
• Curriculum change, including
• Girls would benefit from single sexed schooling for science
• Science could be feminised for girls

This study was interesting for its approach, its readability, and its unambiguous discrimination in favour of curriculum change for girls, even to the point of single-sex lessons for natural science and teaching a feminised curriculum.

My reaction to this paper

It demonstrates the importance of not just the question asked, but rational behind the research in the first place, and selecting data to write the story you want to tell. It all makes sense within the report, in a similar way to a novel does. Whether it is truth is arguable. That it is valuable is undeniable. After all, another researcher could emulate the research but find boys need curriculum change to have a fairer chance of constructing their gender identities in a mixed school setting, especially today when the media and governments admit that curricula seem to favour girls over boys, al least in so far as examination results show.

The quantitative versus qualitative debate continues. What I see at the moment is that qualitative studies are probably easier to do, more interesting to write up and to read when published and more likely to be understood by interested parties because the question why is the focus, rather than the questions what and how much or how often. In education people and their hopeful transformation matter. Measor used names a lot, and that made the report about people.

In a dental analogy, the toothbrush may be electric with x thousand revs per minute, but the manual inter-dental brush can reach where it can’t, preventing gum disease that the more powerful tool alone could not. Both are necessary, but one is more frequently needed than the other. The toothbrush is qualitative reseach and the small brush for focus and discrete action is quatitative research.